In today's society many companies invest heavily in establishing an electronic business focused at providing customers with electronic commerce possibilities. Many authorities are also looking to providing network enabled services such as offering various registrations and information services through computer enabled network services. Companies and institutions also invest in providing online registration. Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, ecommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.
However, due to the large number of currently used operating systems and the even larger number of computer software for these operating systems it is a huge effort to transform a document such as an electronic form into a format that can be used by all different operating systems and software. Not only does the display format of the document or form be transformed, so must also the data to be input into the forms. The situation grows even more complex when electronic forms that are specific to an application are taken into account and that needs to be shared.
To accomplish an easy sharing of documents such as forms Adobe Systems® created their Portable Document Format in 1993 and became free for use in 2001. Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange. This file format is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it.
The PDF is a highly usable format, but it still requires that a document is transformed into a PDF. It also requires that both the creator and the reader have software than can read PDF. And, more importantly, it requires that the reader/writer has special software for editing a PDF. The PDF format is, however, not suitable for all electronic forms including application specific forms.
As would be clear to any skilled person the costs of transforming all data for various applications' forms would be very high.
There is thus a need to be able to share an electronic form for any purpose and of any origin, such as an application specific form, to allow a user to input data into the form and have the form be accepted by the application related to the form.